I don’t understand what kind of point you’re making here.

Are you saying that support contracts are completely worthless because some bugs are closed WONTFIX?

B2B generally does not run on the “let’s screw our customers as much as possible” model. Of course, some do—companies like IBM and Oracle are famously extractive, and cloud providers are trying their best to bait you into getting locked into their cloud.

But in a typical B2B scenario, the support contract is the entry price for having real people read your bug reports and respond in a timely fashion. That’s the starting point, and from there, the bug will get fixed, or you’ll get connected to a “customer support engineer” or someone that will tell you that you’re using the product wrong, or you’ll be given a workaround. Without the support contract, you don’t get the workarounds, you don’t get the fixes, and you don’t get the contact with engineers. You just get to figure it out on your own. Yeah, a percentage of bugs get closed WONTFIX. That’s normal. Yeah, the contract may only require a response and not a fix. The actual practice is that you get some bugs fixed, and some not, and that’s a lot better than your bug reports going straight into the trash.

For Red Hat, there are bugs and there are customer cases. The two are not the same, but they are linked internally. Customer cases don't deal with "X functionality doesn't work in libvirt", but rather a higher level issue that the customer can't resolve due to the underlying bug. Here a workaround the customer can live with is a perfectly acceptable solution.

In my time I was there I never saw a bug closed as WONTFIX unless the customer case was resolved in a satisfactory manner. Red Hat people are very aware who's paying the bills. I have seen badly managed escalations, but I've never seen anyone taking customer problems lightly. However, bugs that have no customer case attached to them carry very little weight unless an engineer, a PM, etc says that this is really bad and will cause problems in the future.

This is part of where the disconnect comes from. Red Hat prides itself in being an open source company, but it is first and foremost a customer-oriented company. Sure, often individual people will take time they have left and go fix something for the community, but if it's something more involved, it will need PM and management support. Benefiting from and also providing their customers with open source is simply part of the model that has worked for Red Hat, but nobody should be under the illusion that this is done for the greater good. Red Hat is a company and companies serve the purpose of making money for their shareholders. If this happens to align with the interests of the open source community, that's awesome, but will not always be the case. Over the past few years there have been numerous instances of that unfortunate reality.

Without knowing the specifics about libvirt's funding, if a project needs to be truly community-driven, the community must come up with a model that doesn't involve Red Hat paying a large portion of the salaries of the people involved, or it will be subject to Red Hat's business interests.